A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, August 07, 2010

All the social networking gurus agree that it's necessary to tightly integrate all of your efforts -- to make sure that Facebook and Twitter and Plaxo and Uqbeki and Tjalmar and LinkedIn (you may not have heard of all of them; they're either deeply cutting-edge or entirely products of my imagination) all mirror your blog updates, so that anyone who has ever heard of you will instantly know of every slightest glancing thought you may have. [1]

I've fitfully tried to live up to that -- Facebook auto-updates both my blog posts and tweets -- but this blog and Twitter have never had more than a nodding acquaintance. Oh, sure, I fully intended to tweet whenever I had a new blog post -- and I did it semi-regularly, when my Twitter account was new -- but it fell entirely by the wayside soon afterward. The era of benign neglect ends today, though: I've just set up something that should auto-tweet links to new blog posts, and so this particular blog post is primarily a very baroque way of testing to see how this system actually works.

I have no idea if the people who follow my Twitter feed want to read my blog, or if they even know it exists. (Hell, I'm not entirely sure why people I don't know do follow my Twitter feed; I'm very sporadic, and rarely on topic.) But now they won't be able to escape knowledge of it, since that's the way of the world today.

In case there are any blog readers who didn't know I was on Twitter, and want to stalk me more efficiently, my name there is, of course, @Hornswoggler. And, as always, my social networking policies are at the top of the sidebar, not that I've really needed them. (I've worked in corporate America for twenty years; I know that policies for every possible event are necessary.)

[1] Those same gurus also say that you should be on message all the time, relentlessly driving the same few simple points like a spike into your readers' brains. I disagree. This is why they are high-paid consultants with diamond Rolexes, and I'm blogging from my basement on a Saturday afternoon.